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On My Early Years in the IB, 2008–2010

Note: This piece belongs to a loose series of reflections on my years working with the International Baccalaureate at Ritsumeikan Uji.

Over the years I have written about various moments and characters from that period — the improbable dinner conversations, the bureaucratic skirmishes, the strange coalition of personalities that somehow managed to build something durable inside a large Japanese school system. Pieces such as On the Eventification of Pre-Identified Incidents, Dr. Fox, and On Good and Great Talkers circle around that same institutional landscape from different angles.

This essay goes further back than those. It describes the early years when the program existed mostly on paper, when the staff could still fit around a single table, and when the whole project balanced uneasily between optimism and administrative chaos.

Looking back now, what strikes me most is not the difficulty of the work itself but the sheer improbability of the outcome. Programs like this often fail quietly long before authorization. The fact that ours did not is largely due to a small group of people who were willing, for a time, to push far harder than their job descriptions required.

This piece is my attempt to record that moment before memory smooths it into something simpler than it really was.

Epigraph

It’s like a visit to the moon

or to that other star

I guess you’ll go for nothing

if you really want to go that far.

— Leonard Cohen, Death of a Ladies’ Man

I. The Call-Up

In February 2008 I was called down to the principal’s office at Ritsumeikan Uji.

At that point I had been at the school for several years already. I had started part-time in 2002–03, moved to full-time shortly after, and by 2007 had landed on what I later called “the man under the bridge contract.” The bridge in question was a middleman arrangement run through a broker named Masaki Yasumoto, a classic education-world intermediary. These figures flourish in private school systems: part fixer, part recruiter, part relationship broker.

Masaki was a funny guy. We were friendly in those days. He invited me to his Christmas parties—cheap hotel buffet affairs—and occasionally took me out for yakiniku. I later fell out with him, but that belongs to another story. At the time we were on good terms.

Through Masaki’s bridge contract the school kept me on staff while avoiding a full tenured appointment.

So in February 2008 I was teaching SEL under Mary Walters and a handful of social studies classes. Business Management was still in my future. That morning Principal Kitamura and Vice-Principal Terada called me in. We sat on the little sofa chairs in the office. They pitched me the role of IB Diploma Programme Coordinator. At the time I knew almost nothing about the International Baccalaureate.

My entire knowledge base consisted of one fact: a school called Katoh Gakuen near Numazu had introduced IB in 1999. That information had come secondhand from Mr. Ogawa, our Head of High School. That was it. No workshops. No training. No background. Just the idea.

When they asked if I would take the job, I said yes—on one condition. I needed a sennin appointment when the bridge contract ended. Kitamura said we could revisit the matter in a year. Good enough. I went home and discussed it with my wife. The next day I accepted. I was 34 years old and this felt like my big break.

I was determined to make the most of it.

II. The Principals

When I first arrived at Ritsumeikan Uji in 2002 the principal was Kawasaki. I barely knew him.

He made speeches at opening ceremonies and graduations but I never interacted with him personally. The gossip around the school was that he was a major power broker in the wider Ritsumeikan system. The other rumor—less flattering—was that he hired office staff based largely on the attractiveness of their legs. Whether true or not, the administrative office at the time did indeed contain several strikingly good-looking employees.

In 2008 Kawasaki left the school and moved to a senior role at Ritsumeikan Suzaku. Later he attempted to become Chancellor of the entire university system. That campaign became a minor drama inside the organization. My immediate boss at the time, Dr. Fox, supported him, as did another senior administrator, Higashitani.

At one point Kawasaki’s campaign team came to Uji to gather support. In the meeting room one of the Suzaku representatives looked at me—sitting there in a suit—and said:“Dr. Fox, we are so happy to have your support.” Fox was about 65 years old at the time. I was 39. But apparently one foreigner looked like another. It was harmless and genuinely funny.

Kawasaki ultimately lost the election by a handful of votes and eventually left the Ritsumeikan system.

III. The Placeholder

Kawasaki’s successor at Uji was Kitamura. This appointment shocked everyone. Kitamura had been Head of the Junior High School and had relatively little senior administrative experience. Overnight he jumped several levels and became principal.

Only later did I learn the reason. Kitamura was essentially a placeholder. The real plan was for Shiozaki, a senior administrator who had been on extended medical leave, to return once his health recovered. Shiozaki was nearing retirement age and the system wanted him back in charge before he finished his career. Kitamura’s job was simply to keep the seat warm. It was brutal, but that’s the old Keichimeikan way. And to his credit, he did exactly that. He also gave me my big break.

Years later I saw him again at the Kyoto girls’ Ekiden race on Christmas Eve. He was wearing a worn sweater and looked slightly down on his luck. I didn’t exactly admire him as a leader. But I always felt compassion for him.

After all, he took the bullet for the squad.

IV. Hashizume

Another key figure in the early IB story was Hashizume. Hashizume occupied a strange position. Officially he was an office administrator. In practice he was the number two power in the building. All major financial decisions flowed through him. Every yen connected to the IB project passed through his hands.

His real passion, however, was American football. He coached the boys’ football team and took the job extremely seriously. Years later he left Uji entirely after being recruited by a major university program in Tokyo.

Dr. Higashitani, who despised him, called the hiring university “idiots and imbeciles” when he heard the news.

Hashizume was also a prodigious drinker. We went out drinking together exactly once. It started at ING, the little rock bar in Kiyamachi. Then we moved to several other bars. Then it was 3 AM. Then Hashizume started calling friends who owned additional bars and asking them to stay open. They agreed. By the time I finally staggered home it was about 4:30 in the morning.

The next day I was violently hungover. Pocari Sweat. Miso soup. Saltines. Nothing stayed down. By noon I was in the hospital on an IV. Hashizume, meanwhile, seemed perfectly fine.

V. VP Terada

The most important administrator in the entire early IB story was Vice-Principal Terada. Terada had spent fifteen years in the school as a homeroom teacher and grade leader before moving into administration. When the IB project began he became my direct ally.

Every Tuesday afternoon the school held the Steering Committee meeting. This was the arena where every IB proposal had to be approved.

My memos would go to Terada first. He rewrote them in polished Ritsumeikan bureaucratic Japanese and presented them to the committee. I usually stayed silent while Terada handled the negotiations.

One day I noticed something interesting. Whenever someone opposed one of our proposals—especially Ms. Ono, my great nemesis—Terada would cover his mouth with his hand and say something like: “That is a very good point. We will have to think about that.”

At first I believed him. Then one day after a meeting I confronted him in a small side room. He laughed. “No,” he said. “We are not thinking about it at all.”

He was simply letting the opposition save face. That was when I realized I could trust him completely.

VI. Pre-Authorization

Our pre-authorization visit came in May 2009. The visiting team included Steve Keegan from the IB regional office and Peter MacKenzie, principal of Hiroshima International School.

At that point we barely had a staff. It was essentially just me and Tim Chanecka, who was helping temporarily until we could hire more teachers. I had written almost all of the program policies myself—language policy, assessment policy, academic honesty—working largely alone.

The visit went reasonably well. At one point Keegan left the room and accidentally left his notebook open. I glanced down. The only thing written on the page was: “Stress in the school.”

Fair enough.

We passed pre-authorization.

VII. The Staff

By the time the authorization visit in May 2010 arrived we had assembled an actual team.

The core group looked like this:

  • Me — DPC, CAS, TOK, Business Management, and History
  • Scott Sim — English A and future homeroom teacher
  • Mike Gurnick— Mathematics, assessment, and scheduling
  • Tomoko Wano — Japanese A and translation powerhouse
  • Nick Sutton — Physics (part-time)
  • Oliver Manlick — Chemistry curriculum design
  • Ayako Kurokawa — Visual Arts

Ms. Wano in particular was indispensable. She attended every senior meeting, translated every document, and essentially kept the program alive during its early phase.

Without her we would not have survived.

VIII. The Dinners

During the authorization visit we hosted the visiting team for two dinners. The first night I chose a small izakaya near Kyoto Station. Mary Walters had warned me that it was “kind of a greasy spoon.” But when we arrived Peter MacKenzie looked around happily and said: “This is great. People usually take us to the fanciest restaurant in town to try and impress us.”

Score one for the hokke and the frosty mugs of beer.

The second dinner took place at Suzaku. Five of us attended: Shiozaki, Keegan, MacKenzie, a sharply dressed Suzaku administrator with a goatee, and me. At one point MacKenzie’s wine glass ran empty. There was no waiter nearby. So I stood up, walked around the table, and refilled his glass. When I sat down the Suzaku administrator gave me a small approving nod.

Another quiet point scored.

IX. The August Scare

The visit ended. Then we waited. Weeks passed. By mid-August there was still no decision. At the time I was in Oregon, visiting my family with Sachie and Hugh. Instead of relaxing I spent the vacation checking email obsessively.

Finally I contacted Keegan. A few days later he replied. There was a problem. Several of our teachers—including me—did not possess formal teaching licenses in our home countries.

I reminded him that we had discussed this already during the visit. The Kyoto Board of Education did not require Western-style teaching licenses. They evaluated subject knowledge based on transcripts and TESL credentials.

Keegan agreed. But Peter MacKenzie was raising objections.

So I pushed back. Politely—but firmly. The IB operates in over 120 countries. Mandatory teaching licenses are not a universal requirement.

Then I gathered examples from elite IB schools in the United States whose hiring requirements explicitly did not require teaching licenses. After that the objection disappeared.

Two weeks later the decision arrived. Ritsumeikan Uji was officially granted IB World School status. The certificate—signed by IB Director General Jeffrey Beard—was hung in the principal’s office.

After months of uncertainty, we finally exhaled.

X. Exhaustion

In truth, by that point I was completely spent.

That summer I had also attended the OACAC conference at Babson College as the school’s overseas college counselor. I had traveled, networked, presented, and worked almost nonstop. By the time authorization finally arrived I felt less triumphant than drained.

Not depressed. Just cooked.

The exhaustion lasted until about November 2010. After that I rallied. Because the next great milestone was coming. In April 2011 we would begin our first actual IB teaching.

But that is another story.

Dedication

For the whole team that carried our little IB program through authorization.

A million thank-yous.

And especially for Vice-Principal Terada. You’re the motherfucking GOAT baby!

Note: If you liked this piece you may like the pieces below which also discuss my time with the IB.

On Why I Told the World to Fuck Off for 36 Hours
On the Long Cut: The COVID Years (2019–2022)
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On the Long Cut: The COVID Years (2019–2022)

Note: This essay forms part of a longer series recounting my professional life in and around the International Baccalaureate program at Ritsumeikan Uji. It follows earlier pieces concerning the Dr. Fox years and the gradual evolution of the IB program there, and covers the period roughly from late 2018 through the early months of 2022.

The years described here coincided with the global COVID-19 pandemic, which disrupted institutions and routines in ways both large and small. The narrative therefore moves between several overlapping threads: my temporary assignment at the Suzaku campus, a prolonged period of leave and personal drift, the strange half-life of Kyoto’s bar culture during the pandemic years, and finally my gradual return to teaching and the IB program at Uji.

As with other pieces in this series, some names and identifying details have been adjusted or omitted where appropriate. The goal of the essay is not to settle institutional scores but to record the texture of a particular stretch of life—its confusions, absurdities, and small recoveries of purpose.

Readers encountering this piece independently may wish to consult earlier essays in the series, including those on the Dr. Fox period and related institutional episodes, for additional context.

Epigraph

“If you wanna take the long cut / we’ll get there eventually.”
— Uncle Tupelo

I. Return

On December 20, 2018, I landed at Kansai International Airport after a twenty-two-day music trip along the American East Coast. I had seen bands in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, spent too much money, and generally had the time of my life. That journey has been written about elsewhere, so I won’t linger on it here. What matters for this story is simply that I came back to Japan exhilarated and somewhat unmoored.

The first thing I did upon landing was send an email to Dr. Fox. I told him that although I still carried some anger about how things had ended at Ritsumeikan Uji, I appreciated his help securing a temporary role for me at Suzaku beginning in March. Both statements were true. What I did not yet know was how miserable that position would become.

I had two months before the job began. They were among the freest weeks I had experienced in years.

I wrote constantly. I worked on the early sections of Thin Man: Singapore and drafted essays that would later become Eventification, Helmet Laws, and On Zone Defense. I was about to begin the St. George’s School series. Periscope had faded from my life, partly because the platform had run its course and partly because a particular person who had made it interesting to me was no longer there.

I spent some time with Philip, though he was busy with his own life and his relationship with his wife seemed temporarily on the mend. Mostly I wandered between Tokyo and Kyoto, writing and drinking coffee and enjoying the strange luxury of being at loose ends.

In the third week of January I attended a Drunk Poets open mic in a small bar near Shibuya. I arrived absurdly early because I didn’t know the neighborhood. While waiting in the stairwell I met a woman who introduced herself using her poetry name. We talked for nearly an hour before the reading began. She was a veteran of the open-mic circuit and showed me how the evening worked. I read first after the break; she followed me.

It was a pleasant night. I had no idea at the time that the conversation we began that evening would extend, mostly by phone, for more than two years.

II. Suzaku

My assignment at Suzaku began on March 1, 2019.

There were no students.

Technically the building housed graduate programs, but they lived on lower floors and we might as well have been ships passing in the night. My office was on the fifth floor, a large open room filled with perhaps forty people: a mix of temporary teachers like myself and permanent administrative staff.

It was, in a word, dreary.

I commuted each morning to Karasuma Oike, walked down to the Suzaku campus, sat at my desk, and tried to look busy until five o’clock. Sometimes a consultant whose job seemed to consist mainly of visiting other campuses would take me on excursions to places like OIC or the original Ritsumeikan High School. These trips were well-intentioned but clarified nothing. No one quite knew why I was there, least of all me.

Within days I began to feel something I had never really experienced before: the creeping onset of depression. The problem was not that the work was difficult. It was that there was no work at all.

By April I had started leaving the office early. By May I was appearing only sporadically. The remarkable thing was that no one seemed to notice.

III. Drift

If I was not at Suzaku, where was I?

Mostly at home.

During the day I played chess online, usually on Chess.com or Lichess. I climbed to around 1250 on the former and somewhat higher on the latter, though the Lichess ratings were clearly inflated. My openings were solid, my middlegame acceptable, and my endgame play atrocious. I squandered many promising positions by failing to convert them.

I watched instructional streams from Levy Rozman and occasionally from Hikaru Nakamura, though Levy was the better teacher. His explanations were clear and energetic, and I learned a great deal.

When I wasn’t playing chess I listened to podcasts. The rotation included nearly every program produced by Bill Simmons and the broader Ringer network, followed by an increasingly large catalog of true-crime shows. What fascinated me most were disappearance cases—stories in which someone simply vanished and left investigators grasping for explanations.

Meanwhile the phone conversations that had begun in the stairwell in Shibuya continued. They were long conversations—sometimes five hours a day—covering everything from literature to relationships to increasingly elaborate stories about future plans and imagined fortunes. At first the exchanges were exciting; over time they became exhausting, though we kept talking.

In the evenings I left the apartment and walked to the bars near Karasuma Oike. Takumiya and its sister bar Takanoya became regular stops. Eventually I found myself most often at a tiny machiya bar called Before 9.

IV. Before 9

Before 9 was small even by Kyoto standards. Downstairs there was room for perhaps five or six people around the bar; upstairs another half dozen could sit beneath the original wooden beams of the converted house. Jazz or ambient music played quietly while large black-and-white films—Seven Samurai, Casablanca—were projected silently on the wall.

The bartender most nights was Miyuki.

Philip and I nicknamed her “the Ice Queen,” though not to her face. She could be sharp-tongued and intimidating, yet occasionally revealed flashes of warmth that suggested a softer personality underneath. Regulars were greeted with a curt “What do you want?” delivered with theatrical indifference.

She wore black almost exclusively and carried herself with the confidence of someone who knew exactly how striking she looked. I developed a mild crush on her, though it was clear from the beginning that the feeling would remain entirely one-sided.

During the pandemic the bar officially closed at eight in the evening, though the rule was treated with some creativity. One night two inspectors arrived precisely at closing time. Miyuki announced “last call” in an exaggerated voice, served them a beer they never drank, watched them leave, pulled down the shutters, and then reopened the bar for the regulars.

That was the culture for several years.

V. Leave

In October 2019 the situation at Suzaku was finally addressed. A supervisor called me in and gently suggested that it might be best if I took leave. I agreed immediately. Beginning in November I was officially on leave—a status that would last until October 2021.

Oddly, I felt relieved.

VI. The World Changes

Early in 2020 I read a brief news report about a virus outbreak in Wuhan. At first the story seemed distant and provisional. Within weeks it dominated every headline in the world.

The pandemic years blurred together. Bars closed early, then reopened, then closed again. Conversations moved onto phones and screens. Life contracted into smaller and smaller spaces.

Yet the routines I had developed continued: chess, podcasts, the evening walk to Oike, the occasional drink with Philip or Mackenzie.

VII. Return

In October 2021 an unexpected opportunity appeared.

Andy Meichtry needed to take extended leave after a family emergency. His timetable included several sections of a class called Academic Research in the International Program. VP Nishikawa, who had always been supportive of my return to IB, suggested that I fill the gap.

So I put the uniform back on and returned to Ritsumeikan Uji.

The first challenge was that no one could tell me what the Academic Research course actually entailed. The teacher who normally handled it was on extended medical leave, and the only materials available were a handful of PowerPoint slides sent without explanation.

In the spirit of William Ian Miller, I decided to fake it until I made it.

The students—seniors working on research projects related to the Sustainable Development Goals—were relaxed, good-natured, and only months from graduation. We muddled through together, and somehow two months passed quickly.

VIII. Administrative Comedy

During this period a new principal, Dr. Joseph Hicks, made an impression.

The IB morning briefing was designed to last three minutes and cover the day’s essential information. Dr. Hicks instead preferred to open with extended digressions on topics such as the reproductive habits of moles. After a week I suggested that perhaps the zoology lectures could be postponed. To his credit, he stopped immediately.

Later, during my annual teacher meeting—normally a brief conversation about contracts and responsibilities—he spent most of the time explaining the virtues of traditional Polish music.

I left better informed about Eastern European folk traditions but none the wiser about my job.

IX. Reinstatement

Administrative reshuffling followed later that year, and by January 2022 I was formally reinstated in the International Baccalaureate program.

My roles included IB1 head, CAS coordinator, and student council advisor, along with a single section of Higher Level Business Management.

After the drifting years, stepping back into a classroom felt like a jolt of electricity.

The students were lively and engaged, but one in particular stood out: Karin Sayama, whose enthusiasm for the course reminded me why I had chosen this profession in the first place. Watching her and her classmates rediscover the subject gave me a renewed sense of purpose.

For the first time in years I felt genuinely happy to be at work.

The long cut had taken its time.

But eventually it brought me home.

Dedication

For Karin.
With deep appreciation.

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On My Seven Years Under Dr. Charles Fox

Give me weed, whites, and wine

— Little Feat

I. Arrival, Trust, and First Cracks (2012–2013)

Our former principal Shiozaki sensei retired at the end of the 2011–2012 school year. He left on time, at sixty, having overseen just one International School Festival (ISF), in February 2012, and then stepping away. His departure was orderly, expected, and clean.

Not long after, my colleague Tomoko Wano and I were called into the small room next to the IB office by Mr. Higashitani, who was my direct supervisor at the time. I was still DPC then, not yet formally on the administration, though much of my work already extended beyond that role.

Higashitani told us the next principal would be Charles Fox, a literature professor from Ritsumeikan University. Then, almost casually, he added that Fox would be taking the first two weeks of the April term off to travel to the Ogasawara Islands to help his son with a documentary film.

Higashitani paused. “Is this going to work with this guy?” he asked.

It was not really a question. The decision had already been made. Fox was close to the Chancellor, and with the IB programme growing, it had been decided that it was time for a foreign principal. The appointment carried symbolic weight.

Fox arrived in April 2012.

That first year, I saw him several times a week. I went to his office regularly with issues, proposals, and requests. He came less often to the IB office, but he was visible, present, and accessible. Compared to later years, he felt engaged.

We were still very much in a building phase. Questions were fundamental rather than cosmetic: whether to bring Economics online as an IB subject, how to structure growth, how to manage staffing, how to align IB operations with a larger Japanese institution that had not fully internalized what the IB actually demanded.

Fox was generally supportive. When I raised ideas, he rarely opposed them outright. But he almost always deferred decisions upward. In practice, that meant deferring to Higashitani occasionally, but increasingly to Vice Principal Nishikawa, who was locked in a long, escalating struggle with Higashitani for control of the soul of the school. That battle would define the institution for years.

Two small things I noticed early on.

The first was small but persistent. When Fox felt pressed, uncertain, or cornered, he would drop into a performative Texas drawl: “I’m just a good old boy…I don’t know…I’m new here…” Week one, maybe. Month one, even. But it went on for months. It began to feel less like humility and more like evasion.

The second was subtler. When Fox gave speeches—opening ceremonies, graduations, addresses to the IB community—he often began by explaining that he would speak in both English and Japanese, and why. “Today I will speak in both English and Japanese. There is a reason for that. The reason is that we are a bilingual school.” He would frame bilingualism as a principle rather than simply inhabiting it.

This bothered me in a way I couldn’t quite fully articulate. Later, I would understand it clearly: real bi-cultural schools don’t justify bilingualism. They operationalize it. They have bilingual admissions, bilingual HR support, bilingual communications, bilingual crisis protocols. We had none of those things. Bilingualism existed largely at the level of speech, not structure.

The first real test came with the February 2012 ISF.

Shiozaki had spearheaded the 2011 ISF, and it had been a success. Fox was enthusiastic about repeating it, but he largely stepped back and allowed me and my team to run it. The school green-lit the budget again, and I decided to push hard—to expand, improve, and professionalize the event.

We housed everyone at Ritsumeikan BKC: our students, overseas students, overseas chaperones, Tomoko, Hashizume from our office, and myself—around 150 people in total. Some seniors had smaller rooms, but most students were housed in large shared dorm rooms: one for boys, one for girls.

It was a mistake. An obvious one, in retrospect.

Alcohol made its way in. Boundaries failed. Tomoko and I were housed in another wing entirely, and we had effectively left the students unchaperoned overnight.

The next morning, seniors came to us immediately with a full report. We called Scott, the seniors’ homeroom teacher, at six in the morning. He drove to BKC right away.

We triaged. Scott and Tomoko lectured the seniors while I ran the open mic. We separated students where we had to, called the relevant parents. Tomoko warned me that if the school heard too much too fast, they might shut the entire event down. That felt impossible to me, so we managed carefully. We called Higashitani and Fox at school around nine. Higashitani came immediately. Fox did not. He came only for the opening and closing ceremonies.

The incident was handled. There was a discipline process. Several students were suspended at the very end of term. Fox signed off on the outcome.

But I was underwhelmed. The failure had been predictable, and leadership was thin where it mattered.

By the end of 2012, the IB programme moved from an effectively open budget to a fixed annual one. I was writing policy constantly, with Tomoko translating. Documents were often finalized hours before steering meetings. Higashitani scrambled to understand them and asked for revisions between noon and four every week.

It was exhausting for everyone.

In 2013, mostly to help Higashitani, I was promoted to shukan, the junior most position on the senior administration. That year, I had two dreams—one about a train line I couldn’t quite navigate, another about being pinned inside a roller coaster that led not to thrill but to scrutiny. At the time, I read them as anxiety dreams. Later, I would recognize them as early diagnostics.

II. Competence Without Authority (2014–2015)

2014

By 2014, the rhythms of my work were established.

OD was fully in place as DPC. I traveled extensively for IBEN and with Higashitani and Fox. We were deep in negotiations with KIS over a range of matters that required patience, translation, and careful calibration. Much of the work took place in airports, hotel lobbies, and conference rooms where decisions were floated, withdrawn, and reshaped.

The pace was familiar now. Demanding, but no longer novel.

That year, Fox, Tim Chanecka, and I traveled together to OACAC in Tampa. It was a routine professional trip in the way such things often are: panels, receptions, conversations that blurred together by the second evening. The work itself wasn’t remarkable. What stayed with me happened in transit.

On the flight from Tampa to Washington, D.C., a situation developed that required de-escalation. A man—angry, agitated, and self-certain—was fixated on another passenger he described as a “long-haired liberal.” The grievance was incoherent but intense. It carried the unmistakable energy of someone looking for permission to act.

I intervened.

Not dramatically. Not heroically. I spoke to him, listened long enough to drain the pressure, redirected the conversation, and kept things moving. The moment passed. The flight landed. Nothing happened.

I’ve written about that encounter elsewhere, in Good and Great Talkers, because it captures something I’ve learned over time: that institutions, like planes, often rely on informal actors to maintain order when formal authority is either absent or ill-suited to the moment.

That was 2014.

The work continued. The travel continued. The system functioned. And once again, responsibility lived in the spaces between roles, titles, and official scripts.

2015

From the outside, 2015 looked like continuity.

OD announced in July that he would be leaving, though his departure would stretch on quietly into the following year. In the meantime, the work continued much as before. I remained shukan. Meetings accumulated. Travel continued. IBEN assignments filled gaps in the calendar. We were still deep in negotiations with KIS and other external partners. Nothing felt broken.

At the same time, a new part-time role was added to support a sensitive function. The intent was reasonable. The arrangement informal. Oversight was assumed rather than specified. No one believed this was risky. There was no sense of urgency around it, no raised voices, no formal concern. It entered the system quietly and was treated as such.

That year, David Stubbs was promoted internally to DPC. At the time, it seemed like a good move. I supported it and gave my blessing. Continuity mattered, and internal promotions suggested stability. OD’s long exit thinned leadership gradually rather than dramatically, but again, nothing yet appeared out of order.

The IBEN work continued to provide a counterpoint. Most engagements went as expected. One did not.

It was a pre-authorization engagement with Eton House in China—one of those schools grafted onto an English name without a substantive institutional connection to it. From the beginning, the situation was fragile. The designated DPC, Georgina, was out of her depth. She tried, but early Skype calls revealed fundamental gaps in understanding. The Principal micro-managed aggressively while showing little grasp of IB philosophy or process. A capable Vice Principal carried most of the operational load.

On one scheduled Skype call, I arrived ten minutes late. It was my fault. By the time I logged on, they had already left. A complaint followed. I apologized.

Shortly afterward, Georgina took the unusual step of traveling to Kyoto to seek my guidance in person. We met at a restaurant. She explained that her situation was impossible. Money was tight. Every expenditure required approval from a board chair who was rarely present. I sympathized. I gave her everything I could—practical advice, institutional context, and clarity.

The process continued. I raised concerns about funding and received pushback, but the school agreed to give Georgina limited autonomy over small expenditures. Then a more serious issue surfaced: there was no class schedule. The school had an idea of offerings but no timetable. I told them plainly that this would result in a Matter to Be Addressed—the strongest possible language in a pre-authorization report.

The Principal and Georgina said producing a schedule was impossible. The Vice Principal stopped the conversation and said he could do it overnight. He did.

With a schedule in place, the authorization eventually went through. Georgina left, likely before teaching began. Later, the school complained about me to the IB. I heard about it unofficially and acknowledged that it had been a difficult assignment. The system absorbed the friction. Life moved on.

That summer, my psyche was working as hard as I was.

On August 15, 2015, I had a dream:

I am in college (probably) or at least in a position to have a dorm room. This room is shared and I have a second room which is mine alone and in another building. Whether or not I really should have the second room is not clear, and perhaps because of this I cherish the private room. I have had this kind of set up in dreams before. The private room is well apportioned and clean. I go in and out a few times, and then one time I enter the room next door by accident. My key opens the door and immediately I realize this is not my room. The room is sparse. I leave and enter my room.

There is a new bed in the room and some of my things have been moved around. There are at first two people, an African guy maybe in his early twenties and another guy. The second guy explains that the African has been assigned to this room and that he is a refugee from the genocide in Ghana. There doesn’t seem to be a lot I can say to this so I suggest some changes to the room layout that they had set up and we make the changes. I am not happy about having a roommate however realize that this feeling is selfish in the situation and resolve to make the best of it and welcome the newcomer.

However, when I turn around deeper in the room there are two more people, Americans, a guy and a girl, on the floor eating. They are beginning to generate some garbage which they are throwing on the floor. I bend down to pick up the garbage, smiling an apology that I like to keep things neat. I do not want them to be there and don’t know where they came from.

Back toward the door the African is sitting next to a man from Albania who is shooting heroin. He may be a Roma, which for some reason I know will make stopping him more difficult. Over and over, slowly and competently. This is not good and I start strategizing how to move him out of my room. He is talking and is charismatic, however I am anxious about what will happen if he keeps taking the drug and also anxious that my African roommate will become influenced by him and start using. The whole situation seems to be verging out of my control. I consider the alternative of just ditching the room.

I didn’t analyze the dream at the time. I didn’t need to. I kept working.

Nothing yet appeared out of order.

III. Peak Without Leadership (2016–Mid-2017)

2016

In 2016, the school appeared to be thriving.

The part-time counselor was fully embedded and doing the job as defined. There were no formal complaints, no escalations, no indications that anything was wrong. Looking back, there were clues—but they were faint, contextual, and easily explained away at the time. Nothing rose to the level of alarm.

For me, the year was defined by expansion elsewhere.

My IBEN work intensified significantly. By this point I was working closely with Gill Pressland, who had become the IBEN manager for Asia-Pacific and had effectively taken over my portfolio from Avi Nanda. Avi worked in a different section of the IB organization; Gill was IBEN proper. Around this time, the IB underwent a global restructuring, and IBEN—by extension Gill—emerged with considerably more influence.

Gill was a force. Decisive, demanding, and deeply competent.

Within three years of joining IBEN, I was promoted to Lead Educator for the International Baccalaureate, one of only a handful in the region. I worked frequently with Duan Yorke, and together we handled a large volume of Diploma Programme assignments. Through this work I came to know—directly or indirectly—hundreds of IB educators. My professional network widened rapidly, and my authority in those spaces was clear and functional.

The contrast with home was increasingly stark.

Back at Ritsumeikan Uji, the long-running struggle between Nishikawa and Higashitani finally resolved. Nishikawa won. Power consolidated decisively. From that point on, the school ran flat out, with virtually every decision flowing through him.

Nishikawa was a strong leader. He worked relentlessly. He also had too much to do, and some decisions became personalized by necessity rather than design. The system no longer absorbed pressure; it transmitted it downward.

By then, Fox had become largely ceremonial. Even his speeches were written elsewhere. He attended functions, delivered remarks, and fulfilled representational duties, but operational authority no longer resided with him in any meaningful way. He felt, increasingly, like an afterthought.

We held our final International School Festival in February 2016, closing out the prior academic cycle. After that, there was no budget for me to develop or run future iterations. The festival ended not with conflict, but with quiet disappearance.

Outside the school, my life continued to widen.

I was active in the global Enneagram community and attended at least one conference that year. I was also involved with the International Mental Health Professionals of Japan, and despite not being a trained counselor, I became vice-president of the organization—another example of being entrusted with responsibility in spaces where clarity and judgment mattered more than formal credentialing.

That year, my son entered Ritsumeikan Uji as a seventh grader.

This changed my vantage point. I became more attuned to the junior high school and the International Preparatory Stream. My son did well academically, but his cohort experienced social and behavioral turbulence. I stayed lightly involved, careful to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest. I watched more than I intervened.

The year ended smoothly. We graduated one of our largest IB cohorts to date. The programme was booming. Outcomes were strong. On paper, the institution was succeeding.

And yet, by the end of 2016, something essential had shifted.

2017 (Before the Break)

From the outside, 2017 looked like a peak year.

The programme was doing exceptionally well. Both the high school and junior high school streams were booming. Applications outpaced available spaces. We had decisively outperformed our nearest competitor, DISK — not marginally, but structurally — in outcomes, coherence, and momentum. Internally, this was understood. I had written about it. The data supported it.

There was no sense of institutional fragility. If anything, the opposite.

By this point, Fox had receded almost entirely into the background. He continued to fulfill ceremonial duties — speeches, appearances, the visible rhythms of a principal — and he looked the part. But operationally, he was absent. He took long lunches with the other vice principal (not Nishikawa), read the paper, and watched Texas Rangers games at work. From my vantage point, he had checked out.

What struck me was not his disengagement, but its invisibility. No one else seemed to register it. The institution continued to function smoothly enough that absence did not yet register as absence.

In practice, Nishikawa ran the school outright. Every meaningful decision flowed through him. This had been the case for some time, and by 2017 I had fully adapted to it. I took issues to him directly. He decided. The system was centralized, efficient, and under constant load.

I continued to travel extensively for the IB, working closely with Gill Pressland and handling a heavy slate of IBEN assignments. It would not have been inaccurate to say that I was holding two full-time roles simultaneously: one inside the school, one across the region. Both demanded attention. Both relied on judgment rather than formal authority.

And still, nothing appeared wrong.

The counselor role functioned as designed. There were no complaints, no escalations, no formal concerns. In hindsight, there were clues — small irregularities, moments that now read differently — but at the time they did not cohere. They were explainable. They were ignorable. They did not trigger alarms.

The system was succeeding. Leadership was diffuse but intact. Results were strong.

Which is precisely why what came next was so destabilizing.

IV. Rupture, Silence, Exit (Late 2017–2018)

The break arrived as confusion first.

Late one night in October 2017, I received a panicked call that made no sense. The next days revealed something far worse than anything we had imagined. Documentation removed ambiguity. The counselor was dismissed immediately and barred from further contact.

I issued the announcement myself—an error I recognize now.

In December, I learned she was still contacting students. Fox had promised to intervene directly if that happened. He did not. Partial measures followed.

January–April 2018 (V)

By January, our options were limited.

We hired a new university counselor, Nina, who had been working at an IB school in Nagoya. She eased into the role gradually. Tomoko and I did what we could to mentor her. She managed the relational aspects of the job reasonably well, but struggled with formal written communication in both English and Japanese. As a result, I remained deeply involved in university counseling.

The work continued.

When the new school year began in April, the pressure shifted.

A group of parents complained — not about outcomes, but about process. They argued that we had failed to protect the former counselor from what they described as an unreasonable parent, and questioned what was being done about university counseling more broadly.

I told Fox that we had already held a comprehensive meeting in January. All deadlines and procedures had been reviewed. There was no scheduled group meeting for April because nothing new needed to be communicated.

Fox said the parents needed reassurance and asked that we meet them anyway.

We did.

Fox and I drafted a set of twenty talking points together. They reiterated what had already been said in January. They clarified that families were free to work with external counselors, with one explicit exception. They also stated that the former counselor had agreed, as a condition of her departure, not to meet with students.

I read the talking points word for word.

The parents recorded the meeting. The recording was sent to the compliance department of the Ritsumeikan Trust, along with a request that Tomoko and I be dismissed.

At that point, the asymmetry was complete. I was constrained by institutional responsibility and confidentiality. The former counselor was not. Her version of events circulated freely. Mine could not.

I was formally notified of the complaint by Fox.

I was upset — not by the existence of a complaint, which I understood as an occupational risk — but by what it represented. I told him plainly that we had drafted the talking points together, that I had followed them exactly, and that I had repeatedly been placed on the front line at his request while he remained absent.

I told him that it was time for him to speak up for me.

He said there was nothing he could do. That the matter was now in the hands of compliance. That we would have to wait and see what happened.

That was the moment our relationship ended.

Not because of disagreement, but because of abdication.

What remained after that was procedural. Whatever trust had existed between us did not recover.

In late July, I served as lead trainer at a major IBEN engagement in Bali. It went extremely well. Whatever insecurity I had had about the IBEN role dissolved.

In August I went to John Innes’ wedding in the United States and after that I went to the Faculty of Astrological Studies (FAS) Summer School at Exeter College in Oxford. While there I met Isobel and everything just cracked open. Everything I had been carrying surfaced at once.

I returned to Japan and submitted a resignation letter to Fox stating plainly that I could not work under leadership that did not prioritize child safety. He buried it.

I stepped down in practice. I moved my desk. I stopped attending meetings. I began writing. This blog was born.

In October, early decision chaos erupted again. Fox ordered another teacher to verify deadlines already confirmed. I lost my temper—twice. It was the lowest point of my professional life.

After early admissions, I stopped counseling. In November, I stopped teaching. In December, I traveled to the U.S. and breathed again.

In February, I accepted a position at Ritsumeikan Suzaku. It wasn’t a teaching position, and I was not happy there, a story I’ll tell later.

The Fox era, for me, was over.

Coda and Reflection

Here’s the thing. I wanted to respect Dr. Fox. I really did.

He was my senpai—the one who came before. Like me, he arrived in Japan young and built a life here. I don’t know his full context. What was possible? What was unsayable? Those questions remain.

I don’t doubt that he cared or worked hard at times. But by 2016 at the latest, he was a man out of time. His mental map no longer matched the territory, and he did not do the work to update it.

Schools are living systems. Leadership requires vigilance, reflection, and relentless self-critique. Willingness is not readiness.

My hope—my prayer—is that when my own time comes, I do better than my senpai. That I reflect. That I adjust. That I remember the map is not the territory. And if I can’t, that I step aside.

That is the standard I now hold myself to.

Dedication: For all those who came before.

Note: If you enjoyed this piece you may also enjoy my piece on my former Principal, Dr. Fox. It touches on some of the same themes of institutional malpractice. You can read it here.

https://thekyotokibbitzer.wordpress.com/2026/02/25/on-the-sarah-lawrence-kids-my-take/